The convenience and immediacy of modern electronic based information and entertainment technologies are seductive, and have increasingly lured users away from more tangible media, and especially print media such as books. The public discourse surrounding the progressive migration of readers and other users of print media to their corresponding electronic media versions has often been negative, tending to lament the growing estrangement from an approach to learning and entertainment that has played a major role in shaping the foundations of our culture.
However, books and other forms of tangible media are being supplanted by electronic content for numerous valid and progressive reasons. For example, electronic content enables great storage and distribution efficiencies. In addition, growing awareness of the fragility of the Earth's ecosystem, and the pressures applied by our collective demands on limited sustainable resources militate for approaches to information storage and communication that minimizes that environmental cost.
Nevertheless, some forms of tangible media have resisted translation into electronic form due to the physically interactive nature of their relationships with their users. The relationship of the artist to her canvas or sketchpad, and that of a child to a coloring book, for example, is not easily substituted by a conventional electronic user interface. Thus, a solution enabling transformation of tangible images produced or modified by hand into augmented reality representations of those images in real-time is desirable in order to more fully extend the advantages accruing from use of electronic media to the creative work of artists and to the creative play of children.